Stephanie Burt

So: don’t read poetry. Don’t assume poetry ever means only one thing, other than maybe a set of tools for making things with words, as music means a set of tools (beats, rhythms, harmonies, textures, instruments) for making things with sounds. Instead, find ways to encounter kinds of poems and learn different reasons to read poems, realized in various ways by various poems.

Auden also called poetry, in general, as he read it, “the clear expression of mixed feelings,”

Poems take something like an apple, turn it into the skin, the seeds, and the core.

The right poems for you may not make you more like me; they can, however, change you for the better or help you become who are, who you want to be. They will also give you something that you want to hear, to reread, to share with somebody else.

That kind of sharing or vicarious emotion can come to us through a poem, not just through what a poem says but through how, in what shape, with what sounds it says so.

Just as literal songs convey—or intensify, or complicate—the feelings in their words by embedding those words in melodies, vocal delivery, and instrumental arrangements, lyric poems (some of which can also be sung) present, or complicate, or sometimes undermine, the feeling that their words imply, by using patterns of sounds, of syntax, of word choice, of line shapes or references or images. Does the poet use highfalutin vocabulary or low-prestige slang? Do line breaks match the ends of phrases or violate them (as when O’Hara breaks on “the”)? What do descriptions tell us about the describer? Can you put yourself in their shoes? How do all these facts about the shape of the poem affect how we feel when we hear it and how its imagined speaker seems to feel?

You can pose these questions to a brand-new poem or to one a few thousand years old, such as this two-line poem by the ancient Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus: “Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris? / Nescio, sed fierei sentio et excrucior.” Probably hundreds of writers have put the poem into English (tens of thousands, if you count students in schools); the contemporary poet Frank Bidart has done so three times. One of Bidart’s versions reads: “I hate and love. Ignorant fish, who even / wants the fly while writhing.” Another: “What I hate I love. Ask the crucified hand that holds / the nail that now is driven into itself, why.” There are no fish in the Latin, but there is a cross: a boringly literal version would be something like, “I hate and love. How does that happen, you might ask? / I don’t know. But I feel it, and it hurts, like being crucified.”

And making small models of complicated feelings, making them out of words and nothing else—making them so that they just might last longer than any one moment, or any one lifetime—is one of the things that poems do especially well.

And if you read lyric poems from different authors and different periods about the same situation, the same set of feelings, you can sharpen your sense of how style matters, how nuances of language affect the way that emotions get conveyed or reproduced

This absence of story, or vagueness of story, is for lyric poems a feature, not a bug; lyric poetry can present states of mind, ways to be alive, without having to say how we got there or what happens next. “If you don’t have a story you can still have a style,” remarks the poet and critic Jeff Dolven. Lyric poetry lets you show how you feel and share who you might be without having to tell a whole story, as well as inviting you to put yourself in the poet’s place.